Vocabulary of Silence - by Veronica Golos (Paperback)

About the Book

Poet Veronica Golos has created a conundrum--a vocabulary of silence that acts as a kind of Zen koan for the reader: a negative space, an echo chamber, a mirror. Witnessing from afar the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conducted by the country in which she lives, the poet also witnesses herself, and struggles to find words to carry the weight of her felt responsibility. Ms. Golos then empties her beautifully wrought poems into the vast silence, filling it with the names of the dead and the living.

Book Synopsis

Poet Veronica Golos has created a conundrum--a vocabulary of silence that acts as a kind of Zen koan for the reader: a negative space, an echo chamber, a mirror. Witnessing from afar the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conducted by the country in which she lives, the poet also witnesses herself, and struggles to find words to carry the weight of her felt responsibility. Ms. Golos then empties her beautifully wrought poems into the vast silence, filling it with the names of the dead and the living.

Review Quotes

It's a difficult thing to write about war--especially so the one you're not really in, not in the dirty part. Poet Veronica Golos takes the fragments, the bits and pieces that reach us from the battlefield, and weaves them with a morality and a sorrow, to make us understand both our helplessness and our responsibility. Vocabulary of Silence finds the cracks in our liberal armor and helps us feel our own shame.
--Barbara Nimri Aziz, author of Swimming up the Tigris: Real Life Encounters with Iraq; Founder of Radius of Arab American Writers

In this ambitious second book, Golos responds to the U.S. invasion of Iraq with poems that just as readily evoke the Hindu creator-destroyer goddess Kali. "I offer grief," her speaker declares, "I know its gravity." Yet the energy pouring from these poems is palpable. At her best, they are a surging dark cloth and at the corner of each is a nail meant to hold the lines in place, such that the whole daring enterprise billows from the page.
--Sawnie Morris, Winner of the 2010 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, and the 2007 New Mexico Book Award

Language fails. Eden in ruin. Golos is a serious poet, luminous and brave. She watches our ghosts. Her poetry is wild in walled spaces, tunnels through which much comes: Iraq and America, Israel and Palestine, silence and shouting, war and prayer, light and violence, Mexico and New Mexico, the current news of the day and the essential news of the past & future. Golos is a poet who tells us both who we are and why we are. In her powerfully realized poems, she speaks of an immeasurable emptiness that could destroy us; or--perhaps, save us.
--Angelo Verga, Author of six collections of poetry, most recently, In Praise for What Remains; Curator, Cornelia Street Café Reading Series, NYC.

About the Author

Veronica Golos won the 16th annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize (Story Line Press) for her book, A Bell Buried Deep. She is the author, most recently, of Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011). An award-winning curator and teacher for Poets & Writers, Poet's House and 92nd St Y/Makor in New York City, Ms. Golos has had work published and anthologized nationally and internationally, and adapted for theatrical productions in New York City's Theatre Row, and at the Claremont Theological Seminary in California. Her poetry was the centerpiece of My Land is Me, a four-artist multimedia exhibit in Taos, NM that questioned the western view of the Veil.